Cinema and the underdog

[Did this piece on Jagannathan Krishnan's documentary Videokaaran for The Caravan]

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The young man looks at the camera, points at two trees growing by a wall across the railway tracks. That’s where our video theatre used to be, he says in Mumbaiya street argot. And this is where the entrance was... (the camera pans to record the empty space, as if daring the viewer to imagine the demolished theatre back into existence). “Yeh hum log ka set-up tha. Idhar se entrance dikhaane ka. Magar raid ho raha hai toh back-side se jaane ka. Saamne se bhaagega toh idhar patri hai, bhai – mar jaayega.” (“If people ran out from the front entrance during a police raid, they could get killed because of the rail tracks” say the subtitles, catching the gist of his monologue but little of its colour.)

The cops could come from that gali there, Sagai Raj elaborates. Or they might come from the other side. And all because he was showing films without a government permit. But what’s wrong with charging five rupees for a full-length Tamil movie? How would someone who earns 50 rupees a day take his family to a regular theatre at Rs 80 per ticket?

Though the streets depicted in Jagannathan Krishnan’s Videokaaran are those of a modern metropolis, the typical view is that from inside a moving autorickshaw as slums race past outside and the soundtrack plays a fragment of one of the shrill, tuneless songs (with lyrics like “Na koi chhota, na koi bada hai”) that were a paisa a dozen in the 1980s; the auto might as well be a time machine. This energetic documentary details a world that urban multiplex-goers – even the ones who are serious movie buffs – know very little about. It’s a story about the many ways in which underprivileged people watch and relate to movies, and how their lives and personalities are moulded by their cinematic adventures. It encourages us to think about what a video theatre might mean to people who don’t even have electricity in their village – wouldn’t it be like a magic show, comparable to the bioscopes of a hundred years ago?

But there’s nothing abstract or impersonal about this film – it places the viewer right amidst its characters, with the handheld camera darting from one face to the next, mimicking the eyes of an outsider who has been taken into confidence. Scenes shot in ghostly night-light add to the feeling of intimacy, creating the sense that Krishnan and his team spent a great deal of time with their subjects – and indeed, this 73-minute film was culled from dozens of hours of footage of conversations.

Its beating heart is one of the most compelling “heroes” you could hope to see in a well-scripted fictional feature, much less a documentary. Sagai is part philosophising raconteur, part giggling sociopath, a street savant with a hint of vulnerability. His laugh, an endearing mix of nervousness, brashness and a genuine desire to please, resembles a horse’s neigh, and he is capable of holding forth on just about any subject. When we first see him in a grainy night shot, he is sombrely explaining, “Cinema aur mere mein connection bolega na, Rajinikanth se hai.” (“My connection with cinema is through Rajinikanth.”) But soon the anecdotes grow. He relates stories about smuggling a stack of pirated DVDs by passing the package off as a “Mother Mary statue” and placing it in the luggage of his brother, a well-dressed man whom the police wouldn’t suspect. (“Woh mujhse bilkul opposite hai. Jaise main bilkul normal hoon na, woh bilkul formal hai.”) He shares gyaan about the intricacies of film editing and says “Mere ko cannibals bahut pasand hai” as a horror film plays on the screen. Porn isn’t bad for society, he explains, because watching a blue film can help a man read women accurately. “Woh calculation kar lega ke main kaunsi ladki ko pataaoonga. Uss ko rape karne ki zaroorat nahin hai – ladki khud uss ke paas aayegi.”

It’s possible to wonder if Sagai is too colourful a protagonist – his presence turns Videokaaran into a study of a single person. But it's also apt that this man of the streets has that indefinable thing called “star quality”, for part of the point is that Sagai is largely a construct of the movies he loves. In much of what he says, one sees the self-mythologising process at work. My birth father was a don, a criminal, he reveals at one point. Gory films seem childish to him because he’s seen far worse in real life. (When they showed Passion of the Christ, everyone else ran out but he sat and watched it coolly.) He analyses the behaviour of policemen, and studies people so closely that “even when I look at a shadow I know who it is. When we were screening films we had to monitor the audience and be alert all the time”. He and his friends have been so influenced by movie stars that they are already natural performers – the swagger and the smart lines come easily to them.

In the film’s first prolonged sequence, they discuss the relative merits of Rajinikanth and Amitabh Bachchan and rib each other good-naturedly, their street slang sprinkled with improbable English words – “hardcore” used as an exclamation point, for instance. (“Rajinikanth ka Basha. Kya movie hai na – hardcore!!”) A film speeds up whenever Rajinikanth makes an entrance, Sagai says. “With Amitabh that doesn’t happen – you wait for him to open his mouth and do dialogue-baazi.” On one level, this is classic fanboy talk, with the relative “speeds” of two superstars being used to make some kind of judgement on their mass appeal and effectiveness. But it also shows a film buff’s eye for observation – an understanding of different star personas and the types of viewers they cater to.

For these young men, Rajinikanth is comparable to a God (“Rajinikanth ka picture hum pause kar ke usska aarti uttaarte hain”) – but he is an accessible God; a Krishna-like avatar, perhaps, who might show up in the guise of a rickshaw-driver, dancing with his mates and winking at the camera. As you’d expect, a fan’s relationship with such a deity is ambivalent. One minute Sagai will irreverently explain why South Indian heroes need big crowds for their song sequences: “Background ke liye accha rahta hai. Agar hero akayla naachega toh chootiya lagta hai, cameraman ko baar baar cut karna padhta hai.” (“The hero will look like a cunt if he dances alone – he won’t be able to pull it off.”) But the next moment, he’ll be deferential: “Apun kuch nahin hai ke hum unn logon ke baare mein baat kar sakte hain” (“We are nothing compared to them, we shouldn’t even talk about them.”)

So enthusiastic are these youngsters, so involved does one become in their movie-love, that it comes as a deflating blow when Sagai shakes his head and says, “Jab se video theatre bandh ho gaya, hum picture nahin dekhte.” Today he runs a photo studio, and many of the pictures he takes are of lower-middle class people trying hard to pose like their favourite movie stars – for a modelling portfolio perhaps, or to show off to friends, or just for personal pleasure. “Aadmi apne image ko bilkul khubsoorat dekhna chahta hai,” Sagai the sagacious tells us – another reminder of how millions of “ordinary” people try to cover themselves in cine glitz.

****

Halfway through Videokaaran, Sagai describes how he and his tech-savvy friends would splice scenes into a movie to make it more appealing to their audience. “We could edit even original DVDs, insert porn even into a Schwarzenegger film. And it would be such a hit that if the original director saw our version, he would wonder why he didn’t think of doing that himself.”


Here and elsewhere, one feels that in a parallel world Sagai might have tried his hand at movie-making – but as it happened, he ended up making a video recording of his theatre being torn down. Videokaaran draws to an end with this footage interspersed with a montage of Rajini and Amitabh singing inspirational songs, and Sagai reflects once again on his “spiritual connection” with his hero. “Bachpan mein jab family troubles tha, toh Rajini ka movie dekh ke khush ho jaata tha. Usska message hai ke jeet milega hi agar struggle karega toh.” (“Rajini’s message is that if you struggle, you will always triumph.”)

Is this false hope? What does it really mean when a millionaire superstar pretending to be a coolie or an autorickshaw-driver sings out from the screen, “Renounce the world and the world is yours”? The temptation is to dismiss such “messages” as opium for the masses. But watch Videokaaran closely, see the pride and defiance in Sagai’s eyes as he describes the filmi circumstances in which he set up his photo studio – opposite the studio of the man who had turned him away without even looking closely at his work. “Eventually he saw how good I was and then he wanted to hire me, but I told him no, I’ll open a studio right in front of you.” It’s a nice little triumph-of-the-underdog story. For all the deprivation it shows, Videokaaran leaves you with the thought that Sagai is a survivor – someone who will take his opportunities instead of brooding about his misfortunes – and that he has his celluloid dreams to thank for it.

Laughing zombies, dead mothers, undead poets, bloodthirsty plants...Peruvian terrorists?

[Did a version of this for Business Standard]

The cover of the new Granta has the word “Horror” in a vaguely Gothic font beneath a drawing of a fibrous blob with gooey things peering from its depths – the sort of thing H P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu might have birthed on a cold day. This could lead a reader to expect a collection of supernatural tales in the classic horror tradition, but what emerges is something subtler and more wide-ranging – perhaps too wide-ranging at times. When the word makes its first appearance inside the book – in Will Self’s “False Blood” – the reference is to the author’s long-time drug addiction (“that horror has cast a long shadow over my lives and the lives of my family, and infiltrated my fictive inscape, poisoning its field margins, salting its earth”). A theme is established: these pieces aren’t just about malevolent spirits that might assail us from without – they are also about inner betrayals of mind and body.

Thus, “horror” can mean looking down at the dead body of the woman who gave birth to you. (From Paul Auster’s “Your Birthday Has Come and Gone”, an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, written in the second person: “You have seen several corpses in the past, and you are familiar with the inertness of the dead...but none of those corpses belonged to your mother, no other dead body was the body in which your own life began, and you can look for no more than a few seconds before you turn your head away.”) It can also mean being in a sleep-deprived, drunken state two days after the cremation, answering a phone call to find yourself verbally assailed by a sanctimonious cousin who disapproved of the dead woman’s character and has no compunctions about expressing her feelings.

Nearly as intense as Auster’s account is Julie Otsuka’s poetic “Diem Perdidi”, about another mother suffering from Alzheimer’s, while Kanitta Meechubott’s “A Garden of Illuminating Existence” is a series of hypnotic illustrations that tell the story – in nine intricate colour plates – of her grandmother’s bout with cancer of the womb. In an eerie echo of Auster’s “the body in which your own life began”, the very place that is meant to nourish life becomes a sort of hell where “the pain spreads like a great forest fire”. What greater horror could be imagined? (You can see Meechubott's illustrations here.)

I thought the most intriguing pieces were the ones that mixed tones, weaving genre tropes into real-world narratives. Self’s essay, for instance, is a reminder of how versatile a thing blood can be, mundane, mystical or terrifying depending on the context – it’s a life-force but also a traitor, and an enduring prop in the horror and gore genres. He begins with the words “Sometime over the winter of 2010-11 I began to be gorged with blood, or rather, my blood itself began to be gorged with red blood cells.” (This isn’t good news for him, but what wouldn’t a vampire give to be similarly “gorged”?) The piece also includes a morbid anecdote about a man who used his own siphoned-out, iron-rich blood as a fertiliser for pumpkins (“vampiric gourds”) – a detail that is tantalisingly close to all those pulp stories about carnivorous plants.

“Is vampirism a matter of the overly self-conscious being awakened to life by the vitality of those who are barely self-conscious at all?” wonders Mark Doty in “Insatiable”. But mark the context: this is from Doty’s book about the poet Walt Whitman, and it builds on the possibility that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, based his vampire on Whitman. (The sentence immediately after the one quoted above reads: “Is that why Whitman liked stevedores and streetcar conductors and Long Island baymen, the big guys at home in their bodies, who would never think to write a poem?”) How could “the embodiment of lunar pallor” emerge from “the quintessential poet of affirmation”, Doty wonders, and attempts to answer his own question in a piece that touches on the bloodsucking implicit in art, and on the hints of vampirism in the relationship between a poet and his readers. (“Great poets are, by definition, undead. The voice is preserved in the warm saline of ink and of memory.”)
 
There are a few fiction pieces, of course, and some of them concern horrors of the mind. Joy Williams’ “Brass” and Don DeLillo’s “The Starveling” are about different kinds of isolated people: the first is in the voice of a small-town father whose boy will become a sociopath; in the second, an obsessive movie-watcher follows a woman who could be a kindred spirit, a doppelganger or perhaps just a creature of his imagination. And Sarah Hall’s atmospheric “She Murdered Mortal He” is mainly about the inner turmoil of a woman on the verge of a break-up, but leaves us wondering at the end if her emotions might have summoned up a bloody vengeance.

Meanwhile horror buffs with a sense of humour should enjoy Roberto Bolano’s “The Colonel’s Son”, which is essentially a plot description of a C-grade zombie movie so bad it’s brilliant.

“...there’s only the sound of biting and chewing until the door opens and Julie appears again with her lips (the whole of her face, actually) smeared with blood, holding the Mexican’s head in one hand.

Which makes the other Mexican crazy; he pulls out a pistol, goes up and empties into the girl, but of course the bullets don’t harm her at all and Julie laughs contentedly before grabbing the guy’s shirt, pulling him towards her and tearing his throat open with a single bite.”

(Also see this animation inspired by Bolano's piece)

But the piece that best fits the conventional definition of a horror tale is Stephen King’s “The Dune”, about a nonagenarian judge who has been obsessed since age 10 with an island a short rowing distance from his Florida estate. What draws the judge back to this place is something we learn as the story proceeds – and it builds to a conclusion that should satisfy any genre fan – but as in all of King’s best work, there is a deeper current. This story, which begins with a reflection on how human bodies deteriorate with age, touches on our foreknowledge of mortality and the attempt to beat it off; it’s also a reminder of how fleeting our lifetimes are when measured against larger forces. (I thought there was a moving subtext here: the old man has changed immeasurably, accumulating a lifetime’s worth of experiences, over the 80 years he has known the island, but the island itself remains as still and unchangeable as ever, and will continue to be so long after he is gone.)

There’s little to fault in this book if you consider just the quality of the writing, but I had a minor reservation about the two reportage-driven pieces – Tom Bamforth’s chronicle of a UN mission in Sudan and Santiago Roncagliolo’s personal account of terrorism in Peru. These are good long-form journalistic essays, but do they belong here? If the broadest possible meaning of “horror” is to be used, then of course the answer is yes. But a thematic collection that accommodates such a wide spectrum of fiction, personal memoir and reportage is a little too diffused for my liking. (For a really broad interpretation of the word, why not include one of P G Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories on the grounds that the absence of Blandings from the real world is the most terrifying thing one can think of?) Besides, the book’s back-cover quotes Arthur Conan Doyle as saying “Where there is no imagination there is no horror.” But I'm not sure the Sudan and Peru essays, matter-of-factly listing real-world monstrosities, require quite the same level of imaginative participation from the reader as the other pieces here do.

The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for 2011...

...goes to Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon. I was on the jury and though the decision was “unanimous” (in the sense that all three of us were satisfied with the final choice - we weren't jumping up and down and pulling each other's noses), it wasn’t at all easy arriving at it. To begin with, the shortlist was an especially strong one. With most literary-award shortlists I've seen, it has been possible for me to immediately identify one or two books that I wouldn't seriously consider for the prize. But that wasn’t the case here: by the time I had finished reading the last of the six books, I knew it would be painful to have to pick one of them as the winner (and that my negative feelings about competition in the arts would resurface at some point).

Part of the difficulty was that these books cover a variety of themes, styles and approaches to writing about a subject, from the assured, unshowy storytelling in The Wandering Falcon to the cleverly metafictional narrative of Chinaman. (And those are two books that at least fall together under the broad head “Fiction”. There were also three extremely good non-fiction titles in the list, all with different virtues.)

In short, it felt like a pity that such a range of books had to be pitted against each other – but such are the inevitable hazards of any award process and one must accept them. Hearty congratulations then to Jamil Ahmad who (at the age of 78) is probably among the oldest writers ever to win a First Book prize. And to anyone who hasn’t read the other five on the shortlist: you could do a lot worse than pick them all up.

History of a forward-looking studio

[Did a version of this for the Sunday Guardian]

Hindi-movie buffs have many reasons to be grateful for the production house Navketan, founded in 1949 by the Anand brothers Chetan and Dev – the former an established director who had won an award at the inaugural Cannes festival, the latter on his way to becoming one of Indian cinema’s best-loved leading men. Without the breezy unselfconsciousness of this studio’s best films, its refusal to get too mired in ideology – and, of course, Dev Anand’s urbane and upbeat star persona – 1950s Hindi cinema might have been suffocated by quasi-realist social dramas filled with tragic heroes and martyrs, and by a limited idea of what “Indianness” had to mean.

“In the 1950s filmmakers were involved in the ‘national project’, which inevitably involved the village in some form or the other,” writes journalist-author Sidharth Bhatia in the Introduction to his book Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story, “But the urban world of Navketan, created by the sensibility of the Anands, was as much about the Indian reality… The difference lay in the fact that their early films looked at urban India in an entertaining rather than a disaffected way.”

Personally, when I think of the early Navketan films – such as Baazi or Taxi Driver – and compare them with the more overtly socially conscious cinema of the period (some of the work of Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy, for instance), I’m reminded of the critic Manny Farber’s distinction between Elephant Art and Termite Art: the latter (especially relevant to high-quality genre films) doesn’t self-consciously set out to make a strong statement but creates something meaningful and abiding through an accumulation of fine talents jointly doing their best work. It bears considering that while Dev Anand wasn’t taken too seriously as an actor in his own time, some of his early performances hold up better today than the work of more highly regarded dramatic performers. And the genre films directed by his prodigiously talented younger brother Vijay – Jewel Thief and Teesri Manzil among them – have a fluidity and cinematic assuredness that was often overlooked because of their lack of “serious” content.

****

As you can guess from its title, Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story is a history of this studio and its films. It’s a terrific-looking book, full of rare photographs and stills, but it sits – sometimes uneasily – on the ridge separating coffee-table publications from conventional, text-driven histories. The research is efficient, the writing lucid, but there is also evidence of the Repetition Malaise that hits so much of our non-fiction: on many occasions, exactly the same thought is expressed multiple times, with only minor changes in word arrangements. To take just one offhand example, the section on Taxi Driver finds different ways to provide identical information about Sylvie the dancing girl (also referred to as “Sylvie the Anglo-Indian dancer” and “the dancer Sylvie”, all within the same three or four pages). She “goes with clients to the Taj Mahal Hotel, the unattainable bastion of the upper classes” and “she likes to spend time at the Taj Mahal Hotel, the watering hole of the city’s elite”. Plot synopses do tend to be vulnerable to such repetition, but it isn’t all that hard to avoid. I also thought it a little puzzling that almost every reference to Dev Anand (and there are hundreds, as you might imagine) uses his full name. Given the book’s candid tone, a simple “Dev” might have sufficed.

On the positive side, I was glad that Bhatia doesn’t pass off every Navketan film as a classic; he is frank about what he regards the failures, and also about Anand’s embarrassing post-1970s directorial ventures. (“The treatment of the women was often gratuitously voyeuristic; the scripts were shoddy and the plotlines thin.”) But the principal mode is that of casual, one-line judgements – a limitation probably imposed by the book’s format. Of the early film Afsar, he says (having watched just the surviving three reels), “the overall effect is stagey and immobile”. He writes disapprovingly of the 1951 Aandhiyan that it “was shot in dark overtones”, that it “was unrelieved by any lightness” and that it “was designed to make you think” – as if these things in themselves make for a poor movie. Reading this, one would almost conclude that the good Navketan films were mindless entertainments that followed a fixed formula (and that is far from the case).

Which means that as a history this book is a passable addition to the meagre literature on popular Hindi cinema. The best things about it are the photos and the posters: I particularly liked the delightful illustrated advertisements for Afsar, the stills from lesser-known movies like Humsafar, and the shots of Dev Anand and Nutan from Tere Ghar ke Saamne, but you'll have a good time picking your own favourites.

A boy and a ship: unstructured thoughts on Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

[Notes for a review I may or may not finish writing - as you can probably tell, I have conflicted feelings about the book]

– On a large ship travelling from Sri Lanka to England in 1954, an 11-year-old boy makes the first significant journey of his life; it will be a rite of passage too. Three weeks are to be spent at sea and he is for all practical purposes travelling alone: a distant acquaintance who happens to be on board keeps an eye on him, but she is a First Class passenger while Michael – along with two boys his age and a few scattered adults – has his meals in the least privileged section of the ship’s huge dining room.

The good thing about being placed at the “cat’s table” is the sense of independence and vague disreputability it creates in one so young. Michael spends his days mostly in the company of his two new friends, the self-assured Cassius and the introverted Ramadhin, and their paths intersect with those of the adults around them: a botanist who is transporting a whole shimmering garden in the ship’s hold; a half-Sicilian pianist named Max Mazappa; an acrobat with the stage name The Hyderabad Mind; a quiet teacher going to England for the first time; the enigmatically spinsterish Miss Perinetta Lasqueti; and most thrillingly, a shackled convict who is believed to have killed a judge.

– “Once we climbed the gangplank onto the Oronsay, we were for the first time by necessity in close quarters with adults,” says the grown-up Michael, narrating the story decades after the journey. Over the course of this novel (written by another Michael – Ondaatje – who also happened to be on an ocean liner from Ceylon to England in 1954), we are left in little doubt that his shipboard experiences have resonated throughout his life and become reference points for him. (As a married man, when Michael sees his wife dancing with someone else and making a casual gesture that implies intimacy, he is reminded of seeing a similar gesture made on the ship’s deck years earlier. There are many other echoes of this sort.)

But even while The Cat’s Table recognises the ways in which people are shaped by – and return to – their early experiences, it is perceptive about the huge gulf between childhood and adulthood. At one point, Cassius suggests that the boys keep their backgrounds to themselves. “He liked the idea, I think, of being self-sufficient. That is how he saw our little gang existing on the ship.” It’s a reminder that this is how so many of our earliest friendships play out, with the participants being unaware of, or uninterested in, family and background details that will later come to mean a great deal.

– This book is also about the impossibility of knowing exactly how and when you pass from one life-stage to the next. (When sailing through one vast body of water after another, the boundaries are necessarily imprecise. There are no signposts to tell you exactly where this sea ends and that ocean begins.) Even as Michael spends his time blithely adventuring with his friends – “being a child”, in other words – there are passages where he shows the self-awareness one associates with growing up. A significant moment between him and his older cousin Emily, who is also on the ship, carries a hint of sexual awakening before resolving itself into a more conventional scene of a distraught child being consoled by a relative. On another occasion, briefly coerced into assisting a thieving Baron - his body covered in the oil that allows him to slither through a narrow cabin window - Michael sees himself in a mirror. “This was, I think, the first reflection or portrait that I remember of myself,” the adult Michael tells us, “It was the image of my youth that I would hold on to for years – someone startled, half-formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet."

(This reminded me of Pip in the graveyard in the superb opening pages of Great Expectations: “My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening...”. Incidentally The Cat’s Table contains a brief but important reference to Dickens’s convict Magwitch.)

– What slightly muddied my appreciation of The Cat’s Table is that this is two different novels in one, and they cut into each other’s space. The first is a pure adventure tale, a boy’s voyage of discovery on board an unimaginably big ship where many exciting things happen and many intriguing people are met. The second is a more reflective attempt to link these events with Michael’s future, and while this is done with care and insight, the two modes don’t always come together seamlessly.

Initially it seems the story will be set exclusively in the distant past (and aboard the ship), but then the first of many “flash-forwards” occurs – a bracket-enclosed, page-length paragraph in which Michael mentions a further acquaintance with Ramadhin in London. Later, midway through the book, we are taken off the ship for 30 pages and given extended information about Michael’s subsequent life, including a relationship with Ramadhin’s sister Massi; and there is another long detour towards the end. I found my attention drifting during these sections. The Cat’s Table has many lovely passages and a real feel for how people and their relationships change over time, but the minor disconnect between its two halves make it as choppy in places as the ocean Michael crosses on his way to a new life.

– Some of the flash-forwards do work well on their own terms, adding new layers to our perspective on the ship days. For instance, though Michael appears to be closer to Cassius than to Ramadhin while they are together on the Oronsay, we learn that he will lose all contact with the former after they disembark. This is believable at a strictly realist level: we all know about intense childhood friendships which, when freed from the contexts in which they were formed, were quickly forgotten. But since The Cat’s Table constantly invites us to read it at a metaphorical level (with the three-week journey representing the wonders and uncertainties of childhood), I think it’s worth considering that Cassius stands for something latent in Michael – a feral side, perhaps, that he brushes against on the voyage and then turns away from once he reaches cold England. (At one point, recalling a subsequent adult visit to Cassius’s art exhibition – where they don’t meet – Michael uses this intriguing sentence: “Some grains of Cassius had after all remained in my system.”)

Echoes from a floating dream

– I don’t usually pay much attention to book-jacket texts – they can become traps for a reviewer – but there’s a striking phrase in this one: the Oronsay is likened to “the floating dream of childhood”. Ondaatje isn’t subtle about the symbolism of a large ship moving through the great unknown, but he very skilfully evokes the amorphous quality of our childhood recollections. The 21 days at sea don’t come to us in chronological order – the fragmented memory of the book’s narrator does not permit this. Two events – or encounters with different people – that might have occurred on the same day are narrated several chapters apart as Michael gives them a context. The three weeks become a cornucopia of colourful incidents, so that it’s difficult to pin down the order in which they occurred.

And of course, this is how most of our childhood memories work. Those of us who have held on to diaries we kept at a young age, or who have an unusually acute memory for dates, might theoretically know that two significant but unconnected incidents took place in (say) the same week 22 years ago; but when we actually try to recall them, our minds might find it impossible to fill in the other details of the time-span in which they occurred – or to even believe that they happened so near each other.

Towards the end of The Cat’s Table, the adult Michael muses: “Looking back, I am no longer certain who gave me what pieces of advice, or befriended us, or deceived us.” Throughout the book there is a sense of barely remembered conversations, or events that echo one another, so that the possibility arises that Michael’s memory is conflating one experience with another (which, again, is something we all do when attempting to recapture the past).

For example, at one point the adult Michael reads a letter written by Perinetta Lasqueti, where she mentions dressing up as Marcel Proust – complete with a slim moustache – at a fancy-dress party in her youth. This feels like an echo of an incident earlier in the book, when the child Michael describes Perinetta similarly disguised as a man during a port of call at Aden. It leads one to wonder: did the Aden episode really happen as he remembered it? (And could the Proust reference be a sly nod – by Michael Ondaatje the author – to the whimsies of memory?) There are other little recurrences in the writing (such as two references, a few pages apart but in completely different contexts, to the application of unguent on a skin wound) and they probably aren’t accidental, coming as they do from the pen of such a careful and organised writer.

Ode to Paulette

I recently saw Jean Renoir’s superb The Rules of the Game for what was probably the fifth or sixth time – it’s one of those films I always think I won’t be able to re-watch fully, so why not just see a few specific scenes; but then I get so involved with its splendid cast of characters and their romantic misadventures that before I know it I’m more than halfway through (and then there’s no question of stopping).

For the cineaste, The Rules of the Game is a delight on many levels – for the complex scene set-ups and skilful long takes, the many visual links between sets of people and actions, and at least two wonderfully choreographed sequences involving all the characters. But on a less technical level, the most aesthetically pleasing thing about it is Paulette Dubost.

In this cavalcade of upper-class infidels and their equally adventurous servants, Dubost plays a chambermaid named Lisette. She is incredibly good and also (inappropriate though it may be to say this about a woman who could have babysat my grandfather back in the day) incredibly hot. Lisette embodies the old stereotype of the saucy, flirtatious French maid who doesn’t mind having some fun - but she's also resourceful, with surprising emotional depths, and capable of taking care of herself (even in a situation where her insanely jealous husband is chasing one of her lovers about the mansion, rifle in hand). I don’t know if such a type ever existed in the real world, but she should have.

Anyway, after this viewing, I looked up Dubost online and discovered that she died – at the age of 100! – just two months ago. I don’t usually get sentimental about the passing of public figures whom I didn’t personally know (even if I’m a fan of their work), but this felt a bit strange: Lisette is one of the most profoundly alive screen characters I’ve seen. Many people I know who haven’t actually seen Renoir’s film are daunted by its reputation and by its continual appearances on “Greatest Film” lists; they figure it must be “difficult” or "arty". But it’s one of the most accessible of classics, a warm and endearing tragi-comedy, and the pert girl with the sparkle in her eye - munching, Eve-like, on an apple while she sets a chain of events in motion - is a big part of its charm.

Books into films: the ToI literary carnival

The schedule for the Times of India Literary Carnival (December 2-4 at Mehboob Studios, Mumbai) is out – here’s the link. I’m participating in a session about book-to-film adaptation on the 4th evening, with Sooni Taraporewala (the screenwriter of Salaam Bombay and The Namesake, and director of Little Zizou), director Anurag Kashyap, writer S Hussain Zaidi (who wrote the book on which Kashyap’s Black Friday was based) and the multifaceted Anuvab Pal (with whom I was also on a panel at Kala Ghoda earlier this year).

One thing I like about the programme is that it allots an hour and a half to each session, instead of the usual hour. More latitude for elaborate discussion and hopefully for audience participation too. Do drop by if you’re around.